Resolving “File in use” when moving or deleting a file

Published 03/05/2010 By
Aleksander Nordgarden-Rødner

A while back, I opened a file to see what it was, then decided to move it, at which point I got a “File in use”-error, preventing me from moving, deleting or renaming the file. Luckily, there is a fairly simple solution to this problem:

Enter part of the file name in the “Handle or DLL substring” search field, then click Search

You will get a list of results like so:

In the above picture, we see that there are three processes that are accessing the file I searched for. Finding (and ending) the corresponding processes in Process Explorer should free up the file, so that we can now move the file.